The appearance of many baked goods such as bread, rolls, muffins and the like, which are sold unfrosted or uncoated, is as important as the taste of the product. Indeed, for many of these items, the appearance of the product sets an image with the user or consumer as to how the product will taste. In a small retail bakery, it is relatively easy for the baker to keep an eye on the product and pull it from the oven at some optimal time when it is properly cooked and its appearance is most attractive. In large commercial bakeries, however, an individual baked good cannot be given such devoted attention. Nonetheless, the purchaser of a commercial bakery's product, often a large retail food store or a mass market restaurant chain, will want assurances that the baked goods they purchase for sale or use are uniform, both within a batch and from day to day, so as to have optimal consumer appeal. Several systems have been described to achieve uniformity in baked goods.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,774,433 to Gardiner describes the regulation of the color of cooked (i.e., baked) products such as bread or cereal by the use of a photoelectric cell interconnected to the oven heating system and U.S. Pat. No. 3,486,694 to Henson describes a system for sensing and controlling the moisture content and/or color of an oven baked product. U.S. Pat. No. 3,321,636 to Karrer describes a photosensitive apparatus for color testing and color control, particularly as it relates to the manufacture of bread flour. While these patents disclose methods of color measurement, all suffer from the defect that the measurements they make are semi-quantitative, lacking definition of output and are strongly affected by light in the surrounding environment. The effect that lighting can have on a person's perception of an item is most easily illustrated by the common experience of purchasing an article of clothing thought to be black or a desired shade of red when viewed in artificial store lighting, only to find in natural light that the article is navy blue or some other shade of red. A similar effect can occur when judging baked or fried goods. The artificial lighting in a commercial bakery can lead a quality assurance person to believe that a given product has the desired vividness whereas when viewed is a different environment, such as a grocery store, restaurant or outdoors, a totally different judgement would be made about the product.
Reflective electro-luminescent measurement (RELM) with a light measuring device as taught by use of the present invention can provide a superior qualitative measurement of baked or fried good. Indeed, these goods can be quantitatively scored or rated relative to selected standards using the present invention. The device of the invention and the procedure for using it vastly improves quality control by the replacing current practices of relying on color photograph comparison, personal interpretation or a combination of both in the scoring of baked goods with a quantitive method of scoring. In so doing, the subjective nature of these older types of evaluation is replaced with an objective standard of measurement that will not only greatly improve a quality assurance program in a bakery, but may also have application in automated oven control and non-bakery applications. The present invention, due to its small size and great portability, can be used to instantly demonstrate a definable product.